Create a Shortcut to Quickly Edit Your Hosts File

As a programmer that does a lot of work on web sites, I end up having to edit my hosts file far too often, and in Windows 7 or Vista, you have to use Notepad in Administrator Mode. Tedious.

My quick and easy solution to this problem is so simple that it barely deserves a full article, but we’re going to cover it anyway—basically, you just create a shortcut to edit the file in Notepad, and set the properties to always start as Administrator. The final step is to create that shortcut in the Start Menu, so it will be easily accessible with the start menu search engine.

Once you’re done, all you have to do is type hosts into the start menu, and you can edit the Hosts file.

Let’s Make a Shortcut! 

Open up the start menu folder—Then right-click and create a shortcut, with the following location:

notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Once you’ve created the shortcut, and make sure you give it a useful name like “Edit Hosts”, you should open up the shortcut properties, click the Advanced button, and then select the “Run as administrator” option.

Once you’ve done so, you can simply type hosts into the start menu to pull up the item…

You’ll be prompted to accept the UAC prompt, since you have to edit the hosts file in administrator mode.

And there we are. Edit away!

And yes, you might point out that you can simply change the permissions on the Hosts file to not require admin mode, but that would lead to a less secure system, since malware often tries to edit the hosts file.

Also, you might point out that this was such a simple and easy topic that I shouldn’t have bothered. But I did! Loss of geek points for me.

How To Edit Your Hosts File : Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6)

In Snow Leopard, accessing the hosts file is very similar to Ubuntu. Begin in terminal and use your favorite editor, even is you wish to call a GUI text editor, it is easier to do so from terminal.

The file will look a bit more like Windows, only with a little less explanation. Again we are going to redirect Facebook.

This time it seems that 0.0.0.0 is a loopback and will direct you to the computers Apache test page.

How To Edit Your Hosts File : Ubuntu

In Ubuntu 10.04 and most Linux distro’s you can edit the hosts file directly in the terminal. You can use your favorite editor or even open your favorite GUI text editor. For this example we will use VIM. Like Windows 7, Ubuntu’s hosts file is located in the /etc/ folder, though here it is in the root of the drive. In order to edit the file you will need to open it as root which is why we use sudo here.

Now that it is open we can edit it to redirect Facebook into nothing. You will notice that with Ubuntu there is also a section for IP6. For most needs you will only need to edit it the top section and ignore the IP6.

Now we can save the file and try to go to Facebook.com. Just like in windows we will see that we are now redirected to a site that does not exist.

How To Edit Your Hosts File :Windows

Windows 7

To access the hosts file in Windows 7 you can use the following command in the Run Line to open notepad and the file.

notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Once notepad is open you can edit the file. In this example we will block Facebook. To do this just enter in the following after the # mark.

0.0.0.0    www.facebook.com

Now that you have edited your Hosts file make sure to save it.

Now notice if we try to access Facebook in IE we can’t get to the page.

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Stop Virus entering from USB to Pc and Vice versa

In this post i am gonna tell to How to protect both PC and USB from Viruses. Well, Do you know On what moments viruses transfer from USB 2 PC and PC 2 USB????

1. At the time when we Open USB Drive for Copying a File from USB to PC
2. During Copying a File from PC to USB

So if we do something to stop entering Viruses on these two moments then you can protect both PC and USB from Viruses.

Now the Question arises How we can do this......

Answer:

1. At the time when we Open USB Drive for Copying a File from USB to PC

• On this time if we disable the Writing Property of USB drive then viruses can't enter in the USB.

Now Steps to disable the Writing Property of USB drive:

1.  Click Start, click Run, type Regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.

2.  Go to HKLM > System > current control set > control

3. Right click on Control folder> new> key and give name 'StorageDevicePolicies'

4. Now In the right side window right click > new > Dwrd value and give it a value '1'

5. Now close registry, restart PC. 

2. During Copying a File from PC to USB

• Always use 'send to' (right click on file that has to copy> send to > USB Drive) except copind and pasting file.
• During Copying a File from PC to USB Remember to enable the Writing Property of USB drive by changing value 0 in step 4.

Direct shortcut to Enable and disable the Writing Property of USB drive 

• EnableUSBWrite
• DisableUSBWrite

Note: Registry Modification will be in effect only after Reboot PC.

Be safe